The Reel Stuff

THE REEL STUFF:by Brian M. Thomsen Equally Good Things That Are Not Quite Interchangeable A friend of mine occasionally teaches a class at Hofstra and asked me if I would like to sit in as a guest participant on a few occasions. The subject was Science Fiction Writing with a secondary emphasis on film so I readily agreed to sit in on the session that was tentatively titled "When Bad Movies Happen to Good Stories." As per usual the class broke down into two distinct camps: those whose first introduction to the realm of the fantastic was through films and TV (they usually maintained that nothing can ever beat Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, or the X Files, etc., and that the printed word is inferior to moving celluloid image), and the opposing camp whose first introduction was the printed word (usually Asimov, Heinlein, or Ellison) and usually maintained that no film/dramatic adaptation of a work of fantastic fiction has ever done justice to its source material. The discussion at hand had moved on to the latest offender/cinematic masterpiece Starship Troopers when my opinion was sought. "I loved the book and I loved the movie," I replied and proceeded to explain that they were two equally good things that were by no means equally interchangeable. True the book is dated and much more relevant to a reader who is politically in sync with Heinlein's views, and true the film begs for a sequel to finish telling the story covered by the book and is overly reliant on the technical wizardry that went into the giant bugs, but these are minor points. I enjoyed both. I've always been a movie buff and my first introduction to the world of adult paperback books was through movie and TV tie-ins. I remember Ted Sturgeon's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Asimov's Fantastic Voyage, Murray Leinster's Time Tunnel, Michael Avallone's Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and, of course, James Blish's Star Trek, and it was only years later that I realized that these were the adaptations based on the dramatic presentations, unlike Stevenson's Treasure Island and Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which, obviously, preceded and inspired the motion pictures based on them. The stories that launched money-making blockbusters? ?almost any of the stories is worth the price of the whole volume.? The Reel Stuff collects thirteen memorable?and in some cases award-winning?tales from legendary names in science fiction, fantasy, and horror that inspired some of Hollywood?s greatest successes on the silver screen, or found rabid followings as cult classics. Features the stories that inspired: Minority Report ? Total Recall ? The Thing ? Johnny Mnemonic ? Re-animator ? Candyman ? Millennium ? Enemy Mine ? Mimic ? Screamers ? Nightflyers ? Amanda and the Alien ? The Outer Limits: Sandkings **